A flatbed printer assembly is known in the art, for example a flatbed printer assembly as disclosed in patent application WO 2015/082510. Such a known printer assembly comprises a medium support table on which a recording medium may be arranged. Such a printer assembly is particular advantageous for printing on a large rigid medium. Such a rigid medium is, for example, used in the graphics arts for printing signs and posters.
A gantry is provided such that the gantry is moveable over the medium support table and a carriage is moveably supported by the gantry such that the carriage is moveable over the medium support table in a direction perpendicular to the direction of movement of the gantry. By suitably controlling a movement of the gantry and the carriage, a print head such as an inkjet print head is enabled to print digital images on both sides of the rigid medium, even from edge to edge.
A cut path may be an outline of an image intended to be printed on the rigid medium. The cut path may be located inside an image intended to be printed on the rigid medium.
The rigid medium may be printed on by means of a printing device. When one or both sides of the rigid medium comprise a printed image consisting of a marking material like ink or toner material and the rigid medium is cut by a flatbed printer assembly, printed marking material may chip off a printed side during cutting. Therefore usually the rigid medium is cut before printing so that the marking material does not chip off.
Hereinafter a piece of the recording medium is meant to be a piece of the recording medium that is cut out of the complete recording medium. The remainder of the recording medium which is left when the piece of recording medium is cut out is hereinafter called a jig.
By first cutting the rigid medium and printing the images on both sides, another problem arises of aligning the front and back printed images and aligning is time consuming especially when a plurality of media have to be aligned. The recording medium itself may be also aligned on the flatbed support table with a corner of the recording medium to a corner or construction point of the flatbed support table.
Adding alignment marks on the jig and on the piece of the recording medium is affecting the print quality of the printed images due to the fact that the alignment mark ends up under the printed image.
It is desirable to have a flatbed printer assembly that is enabled and configured to print images on a piece of a recording medium cut out of the recording medium and to ease aligning a front and back image to be printed on the piece of recording medium.